The Fall 2007 MITH Digital Dialogues schedule is now available (PDF). As always, Digital Dialogues are Tuesdays at 12:30 in the MITH conference room (McKeldin Library). We especially like seeing visitors from our neighboring campuses around town.

We have a terrific line-up this semester, with local UMD talent (JONATHAN AUERBACH, MARTHA NELL SMITH, TANYA CLEMENT, JOSEPH JAJA, PHILIP RESNIK) presenting their current research on topics as diverse as digital tools for not-reading a famously unreadable book to the computational linguistics of “spin” to early cinema as new media to digital archiving and preservation.

We also have a number of distinguished visitors from off campus, coming from places like the Smithsonian, IBM, the Internet Archive, and the NEH. Come drop by for a fireside chat with BRETT BOBLEY about the NEH’s new Digital Humanities Initiative, or hear the University of Georgia’s DAVID SALTZ talk about “simulating liveness” in his Virtual Vaudeville project and in Second Life; or hear CHRIS FUNKHOUSER on why electronic poetry is like Scrabble. Plus much, much more.

We look forward to seeing you on Tuesday, September the 11 at 12:30 for our first event, with Tanya Clement on “Using Digital Tools to Not-Read Gertrude Stein’s The Making of Americans.”

The program for the Second Chicago Colloquium on Digital Humanities and Computer Science has been set. MITH Associate Director MATTHEW KIRSCHENBAUM will deliver a keynote entitled “The Remaking of Reading.” The University of Maryland’s WAYNE McINTOSH will present work on the Digital Docket, portions of which are being done at MITH.

The Colloquium will take place on Sunday and Monday, October 21-22, 2007 at Northwestern University. This is an event jointly sponsored by the Illinois Institute for Technology, Northwestern University, and the University of Chicago. Registration is free, and you are cordially invited to attend.

Current MITH Resident Fellow ANGEL DAVID NIEVES’s digital humanities scholarship is featured in this week’s issue of Newsweek in an article entitled “African Art’s Long and Winding Road Home.”

The goal of Nieves’s Soweto ‘76 project is to provide users with virtual access to the history of Soweto, a Black township outside Johannesburg, so that they may experience a significant period in South Africa’s history. Using existing oral histories, testimonies, photographs, video footage, material objects, and sound recordings in the collections of the Hector Pieterson Memorial & Museum, the work seeks to redress the existing portrayal of the lives of township residents in the mainstream or "official" historical record.

Congratulations to Angel for this recognition of his scholarship!

The Maryland Institute of Technology in the Humanities (MITH) is pleased to announce two (2) full-time graduate assistantships for the 2007-2008 academic year. We require Web programmers with extensive experience in PHP and JavaScript. Knowledge of Flash/Actionscript, MySQL, and Java are also highly desirable. Applicants should possess strong communication skills and an understanding of the needs of humanities scholars. To apply, send a cover letter and vita to MITH’s assistant director Dr. Doug Reside at dreside@umd.edu. Review of applications will begin immediately and will continue until all positions are filled.

MITH is delighted to announce we have received a Digital Humanities Start-Up grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities’s Digital Humanities Initiative. The $30,000 award will support development of a tool called the Ajax XML Encoder (AXE) by Assistant Director DOUG RESIDE and a team. Work will begin in September.

“The Ajax XML encoder, with its intuitive Web-based interface, will come as a breath of fresh air to those who have previously been frustrated by text-centric tagging tools which require an expert knowledge of mark-up languages,” said Reside. Since the codification of the Text Encoding Initiative standards in the mid-1990s, the process of the creation of digital editions and archives is largely one of “marking up” existing artifacts in SGML or XML. Originally, this was often done “by hand,” with scholars adding XML tags to existing text documents using a text editor. Over the last decade several tools have been produced that make this process somewhat more efficient and accurate, though most still require more than a beginner’s familiarity with XML encoding, and few are open source. Moreover, many digital humanities projects have, of late, become far more multi-medial–relying on image, video, and audio files as well as text. Existing markup tools have only begun to work with these non-textual artifacts. As digital archives continue to grow, the markup tools used to encode them must become more flexible and easier to use.

The Ajax XML Encoder (AXE) is intended to meet this need for a flexible, open source, multimedia tagging tool suitable for use by the non-specialist. MITH Director, Neil Fraistat, noted that “AXE will allow users with limited technical skills to tag text, images, video, and audio files deeply for inclusion in digital archives.” Like the mythological Ajax’s axe, MITH’s AXE is intended to provide users with enough power and flexibility to accomplish their tasks without a great deal of assistance from the technical “gods.”